When you’re at your grandma’s or cousin’s house for a sleepover, there is somehow going to be a movie either featuring, or referencing, Eddie Murphy and his comedic craft. Murphy is a figure that has defined much of Afrikan comedy alongside comedians and writers like Arsenio Hall, Paul Mooney, Robert Townsend, and Keenen Ivory Wayans – also known as The Black Pack. The Black Pack, shaped comedy around the Afrikan experience, around Afrikan cultural production and community. While the argument that these productions partake in systemic webs of white consumption and racial capital point to an overarching contradiction, commentators like Artel Great frame this “post-Blaxploitation” era of film and comedy (if you could even call it post) as a point and tool of resistance. With its audience in mind, the Black Pack highlights aspects only the Afrikan experience could really pick up on, not in a dog-whistling, subliminal messaging way but as an obviously comedic and dramatized reflection of Afrikan life far removed from the lens of racialized stereotypes. Instead, the Black Pack depicts archetypes that humanize and promote the multiplicity of being Afrikan – rather than a characterization in a white visual medium, it is its own cultural production, and through this production (which remains sensationalized and commodified through whatever means of consumption) it emerges as a reference point for cinema history and rejects the violent origins of film and humor stemming from anti-Afrikan violence and the maintenance of white supremacist ideology as seen through Amerikkka’s first picture film, “The Birth of a Nation”.
There is a slight skepticism in framing humor as resistance, especially as expressions of joy are intertwined with a notion of exclusivity and ignorance to a material reality. Much of cultural expression has and is commodified alongside this growing question of resistance, and redefining it with consciousness requires us to struggle against racial capitalism and its extension. In doing so, we should shy away from emphasizing identity politics and calls for representation, and turn our attention to needs redefining of expressions life and the confines of a material validation. I, however, found the way Artel Great explains resistance through Amerikkka’s Afrikan comedy supergroup to develop a fascinating approach to how humor was utilized as a tool of resistance. Humor is reframed not as a way to entertain and assimilate to an industry but as a moment that displays and creates relationships to Afrikan culture, community, and a lived experience that could only be felt while busting out laughing after seeing the remnants of Jheri Curl juice on the couch in “Coming to America”. Places such as the church, the barbershop, hair salon, and the corner store where folks working and passing each other everyday become a part of a mundane tradition that is then recounted through a lens of humor, fiction, and relatability. “Coming to America” is an example of reframing this experience of Blackness by bridging relatability, humor, fantasy and culture with identity politics and demands for complex representations of Afrikan people. Through the geographic and cultural aesthetics, “Coming to America” varies class distinction with a fascinatingly fictional narrative of an Afrikan country of royalty that engages with the lived experience of working and middle class royalty in Queens, New York. The creations of both Zamumba and Queens as spaces of Afrikan social and artistic expression as well as cultural hubs of community depict an outward humanization and normalization of Afrikan life, contesting the stereotypical and racist characterizations housed within the media. Instead, “Coming to America” highlights the possibility of life, a fantasy that centers on Afrikan imagination, and engages with the implications of Afrikan freedom in the fictional realm and beyond.
While writing this, I find myself still grappling with this question of humor as resistance. In a contemporary sense, humor has been an overly sensationalized tool platforming identity politics rather than a struggle – there often is a reinforcement of recognition and visibility that work in ways that both organize structure with capabilities of mobilization but also engage with systemic order of consumption – this dual work of connection and sentiment informs a relationality between interactions with humor as a tool of resistance, but also one to redefine outside of a white capital medium.